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Karl @hexaquo.at · 5h

🔜 #GodotFest

Want to see these slides (and many more) live? Then join my presentation on November 11th at GodotFest in Munich :)

#godot #gamedev

Presentation slide with the text "Plants, Polygons and Pixels: Large-Scale Vegetation Rendering in Godot". The background is a slightly blurred view over a rendered landscape.

Presentation slide with the text "Geometry versus Billboards". "Geometry" is bold. On the right, a highly detailed 3D model of a tree is shown, first rendered, then shaded in white to show the intricate geometry.

Presentation slide with the text "bend your normals!" and two rendered trees. The tree on the right has a clearer canopy shape due to smoother lighting. An arrow points from the left to the right tree.

Presentation slide with the text "Ground-Covering Billboard Clouds" and an image of a rendered landscape. In the right half of the rendering, the plant billboards are rendered as white quads in order to show the geometry.

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Jendrik Illner @jendrikillner.bsky.social · 1d

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 413 - October 19th, 2025 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...

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Fronkon Games @fronkongames.bsky.social · 5d

Sharp Bilinear Filters: big clean pixels for Pixel Art

#gamedev #gamedevelopment #indiedev #pixelart #gameart

Sharp Bilinear Filters: Big Clean Pixels for Pixel Art

Now that I’ve walked through the history of OpenGL and seen what I can do at what points in history, I can attack one of the long-standing problems I had with my old pixmap library. It’…

bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com

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passivestar @passivestar.bsky.social · 6d

Here's how to scatter objects in Blender 5.0 with just a few nodes ✨

Instance scattering in blender

Blender 5.0 is coming to save us from the spaghetti hell! Here’s a ridiculously simple blender 5.0 node setup that scatters objects on the surface of a mesh inside of the volume of some other mesh: An...

passivestar.xyz

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Seven Years in Quebec @dfeldman.org · 7d

Can you actually tell the difference between lossless and lossy compressed audio? (With your current headphones/speakers and ears)
abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html

ABX High Fidelity Test list

A set of browser-based ABX tests comparing lossless and lossy music samples

abx.digitalfeed.net

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 7d

That was fascinating, thanks for sharing! I felt really unsure, but got 72% on the 160kbps lame mp3 test. Seems like the very subtle perceived difference (where I wasn't sure if I was imagining it or not) was right more often than not.

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 10d

now I'm curious too, did you figure it out?

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Kelvin van Hoorn @kelvinvanhoorn.com · 12d

Trying out 2 different approaches to leaf rendering on trees.

The first is a custom mesh, where each quad of the mesh is extended along the normals.

The second is are multimeshes of quads, where the normal is based on the vertex position relative to the center of the multimesh.

#GodotEngine

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Jendrik Illner @jendrikillner.bsky.social · 14d

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 411 - October 5th, 2025 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...

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Roland Meyer @bildoperationen.bsky.social · 14d

So-called #genAI means the abolition of the future through the proliferation of endless streams of stochastically rendered generic pasts. Having turned large parts of the cultural archive into training data, it now traps us in a foreverized pastness, a 24/7 nostalgia for a past that never existed

QuoProQuid @quoproquid.bsky.social · 14d

have just come across a YouTube account that has been using Sora to upload reels of fake, AI-generated “90s sitcoms” every few hours

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themaister.bsky.social @themaister.bsky.social · 16d

New blog post: Outlining an alternative path to learn graphics programming.

themaister.net/blog/2025/10...

A case for learning GPU programming with a compute-first mindset – Maister's Graphics Adventures

themaister.net

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 17d

Ahh right, of course. I knew I was missing something 😅 that's tricky!

Karl @hexaquo.at · 17d

I see, and if I understand correctly, what you'd want is for this "next pass" to only render on top of back-faces (as in the first picture), but not on top of front-faces (second picture), right? Could you use something like sign(dot(camera_direction, normal)) to differentiate between that?

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 17d

Oh interesting! I might be missing something but could you check the dot product between camera direction and mesh normal and use the inverted depth test only if that is negative, i.e. if the thing that's currently being rendered is a back-face and not a front-face?

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 17d

Using a sphere made it a bit easier because I could pass the radius for figuring out when the camera has reached the other side. Maybe that could at least be generalized to symmetric meshes by using the model-space vertex length or something? (But maybe using an approximate radius is good enough)

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 17d

The idea is: make the vertices stick to the camera rather than passing behind it, and use alpha to make these vertices fade out as the camera is moving through the mesh.

Schematic drawing. Left, labeled "before", shows a camera (depicted as a triangle) inside a circle. Right, labeled "after", shows the camera next to a half-circle, the wall of which is right in front of the camera.

$Screenshot of Godot shader code: shader_type spatial; uniform float radius = 2.0; varying float inside_alpha_factor; // I think you could get this out of the PROJECTION_MATRIX, but I was too lazy to figure that out #define CAMERA_NEAR -0.051 void vertex() { // Transform vertex from model space into view space vec3 view_vertex = (MODELVIEW_MATRIX * vec4(VERTEX, 1.0)).xyz; // Calculate a factor which goes from 1.0 (when the camera is in front of the original vertex // position, i.e. the vertex is right on the near plane in view space) to 0.0 (when the vertex // is radius * 2.0 behind the camera, i.e. we're at the opposite end of the mesh) inside_alpha_factor = smoothstep(radius * 2.0, CAMERA_NEAR, view_vertex.z); // Stick the vertex right onto the camer's near plane view_vertex.z = min(view_vertex.z, CAMERA_NEAR); // Transform back to model space and assign to VERTEX VERTEX = (inverse(MODELVIEW_MATRIX) * vec4(view_vertex, 1.0)).xyz; } void fragment() { // Apply the alpha ALPHA = inside_alpha_factor; }$

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 17d

This got me wondering what would be the easiest way to make meshes appear like a volume when moving through them (using only shaders). This is what I came up with:

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 18d

In light of EA's upcoming change of ownership... here's your annual reminder that Will Wright's original GDC 2005 demo of Spore was one of the most incredible game demos every presented, before the game was utterly and totally ruined by EA's meddling.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofA6...

Will Wright GDC 2005 Spore (The Future of Content) Remastered

YouTube video by Zeusmonomon

www.youtube.com

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Scott Anderson @impossible.bsky.social · 17d

This is not only introducing a new approach to OIT, but it's a comprehensive overview of various OIT techniques and a history of transparency in COD.

One thing that seems to be missing is CPU-side depth sorted transparency, which I implemented in SHG's COD branch and IIRC Treyarch had also

ceruleite.bsky.social @ceruleite.bsky.social · 21d

#SIGGRAPH2025 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course talks slides posted: "Adaptive Voxel-Based Order-Independent Transparency" shipping in the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 by Michal Drobot from Activision Central Tech is now online: advances.realtimerendering.com/s2025/index....

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 17d

It's a bit unintuitive but the light shader is primarily used for controlling how shadows work, e.g. for imlementing toon shading. I wrote a tutorial on them here: hexaquo.at/pages/unders...

If you just want your object to glow, what you want is probably the EMISSION in the fragment shader.

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 19d

Really cool! Good idea to combine it with the ProtonScatter addon. Thanks for the shout-out :)

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Kelvin van Hoorn @kelvinvanhoorn.com · 20d

It sure is windy here 🍃

Rendering is based on this great tutorial (hexaquo.at/pages/grass-...) by @hexaquo.at

Placement is done with ProtonScatter (github.com/HungryProton...) by @hungryproton.bsky.social

#GodotEngine #IndieDev #shader #grass #rendering

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PRBG_Aesthetics @prbgaesthetics.bsky.social · Sep 19

Unused pre-rendered backgrounds from The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time (1998)

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Karl @hexaquo.at · Sep 18

Oh good idea! Shader debugging is pretty arcane haha, I'll try to collect and write up some of the tricks I've come up with. And it'd be a good opportunity to dive into "proper" debugging tools like RenderDoc too. Thanks for the suggestion :)

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Jendrik Illner @jendrikillner.bsky.social · Sep 15

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 408 - September 14th, 2025 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...

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